FIFA Women's World Cup 2019 - France

Keith Putnam said:

Also, the ref organizations need to walk back this whole thing of refusing to raise the offside flag until the play dies on its own. The only time they should be keeping their flags down and letting VAR backstop their decision is when it's tight. I've had more than enough of the crap where an attacker is clearly offside way back near midfield and the flag doesn't go up until they've charged down the field and taken a shot. It's dumb, dissatisfying, and as players have been saying it will lead to injuries which would otherwise have been prevented if the play had been flagged dead twenty yards upfield.

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I've also never seen a good explanation of how this interplays with "clear and obvious error." How can you set a standard of review that heavily advantages the call on the filed, while also instructing the field officials to favor a particular call every time? I understand the idea that we want to call offside not so tight and favor goals, to an extent, but this seems like overshooting the mark.

mgarbowski said:

I'm not too familiar with the tennis system. I can read those articles but still cannot really comment on how it works in practice. But in other sports (again I'll go mostly by the NFL) it seems that giving players or teams a specific number of challenges does a good job of limiting the instances of review (how could it not) but a poor job of selecting the best occasions of review. Even though they have a strong incentive only to use challenges for situations that are both important and likely to succeed, it does not seem that most contestants do a good job of it. And because a lot of obviously bad calls never were reviewed the league expanded the way calls that get reviewed. The NFL went from (1) each team gets 2 challenges per game, to (2) still 2 per game but if you get both right you get another, and more and more as long as you keep winning them, to (3) every touchdown and turnover is automatically reviewed, plus officials can decide to review anything late in the game plus the status quo of (2) remained. So now there is almost no limit that is effectively imposed. Also, when you do set limits you end up with the practice of using unspent challenges late in the contest for ridiculously unlikely situations because why not? Oddly, even though I would get rid of video review in all sports, I don't like these types of measures. I guess I figure if we are going to have an inefficient system that IMO does more harm than good, we might as well make sure we get the good out of it, which requires not putting in these artificial limits. I prefer the system where officials decide what gets reviewed.

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Tennis is just about the best sport for video review* because it's 100% objective. Either the ball was in or it was out. The review system in tennis has completely changed the sport, with tantrums aimed at the linespeople and umpires almost completely eliminated.

I agree with you that the NFL is a more problematic case. First of all, I don't understand the need to require challenges all the time. In college, every play is reviewed and the booth can temporarily delay play while it looks (just like in soccer). Ultimately, however, football suffers from a lot of calls that are not objective. This includes, interestingly, whether a ball has been caught - something that would have seemed objective prior to video review, but as you have correctly pointed out, is anything but. Football initially tried to avoid using video review for the subjective calls, but now the NFL is looking at pass interference plays - is a slippery slope in play?

Soccer has a lot of subjective calls. Whether something is a handball involves a lot more than just whether the ball hit the hand. Fouls are not always clear. Does a foul rise to the level of a red card? None of this is black and white. The system in soccer is also different because the officials in the booth do not overrule the official on the field. The official on the field has the final say. This is why calls get overturned even where the evidence might not be clear and obvious. The referee is just changing his or her mind, so they often go with less evidence. Oddly too, it is not the subjective calls that are giving people problems with VAR. It's the slavish enforcement of rules that were meant to be enforced with discretion - like a goalie straying off her line - that has been raising all the problems.

* - To add some ephemera - the tennis system does not rely on actual video replay. Instead, it uses a system comprising several cameras installed around the court. These track the telemetry and spin of the ball to determine if it is (or will be) in or out - indeed, the system will know where the ball will land with great accuracy before it even hits the ground.

mgarbowski said:

I'm not too familiar with the tennis system. I can read those articles but still cannot really comment on how it works in practice. But in other sports (again I'll go mostly by the NFL) it seems that giving players or teams a specific number of challenges does a good job of limiting the instances of review (how could it not) but a poor job of selecting the best occasions of review. Even though they have a strong incentive only to use challenges for situations that are both important and likely to succeed, it does not seem that most contestants do a good job of it. And because a lot of obviously bad calls never were reviewed the league expanded the way calls that get reviewed. The NFL went from (1) each team gets 2 challenges per game, to (2) still 2 per game but if you get both right you get another, and more and more as long as you keep winning them, to (3) every touchdown and turnover is automatically reviewed, plus officials can decide to review anything late in the game plus the status quo of (2) remained. So now there is almost no limit that is effectively imposed. Also, when you do set limits you end up with the practice of using unspent challenges late in the contest for ridiculously unlikely situations because why not? Oddly, even though I would get rid of video review in all sports, I don't like these types of measures. I guess I figure if we are going to have an inefficient system that IMO does more harm than good, we might as well make sure we get the good out of it, which requires not putting in these artificial limits. I prefer the system where officials decide what gets reviewed.

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Mm.

I guess I'm trying to figure out how we get as much of the good out of it (let's say "better perception of the circumstances and therefore better calls") with as little of the bad (seems like "review of calls that were never disputed and an overly exact and literal reading of poorly written rules").

Rewriting rules to account for how they will be interpreted with greater perceptive capacity seems to make sense but I understand that there are limits to that.

Internalizing the cost and adding self-determination to disputes would seem to mitigate overreach on review. There may be other ways to do that (without abolishing it altogether ). As Keith Putnam is suggesting, handball in the box plus encroachment / staying on the line for penalties seems to be another that is causing more harm than it is preventing.

13-0 part 2?

LionNYC said:

Tell that to the linespeople and umpires at Roland-Garros.

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Their original, low tech version used to be state of the art. Not anymore.

What kills me is that the TV broadcast for the French Open would show the Hawk-eye outcome for the point, so it has to be installed on the courts. That costs a lot of money. Why install it if they aren't going to use it??? All they'd have to do now is turn it on.

Why not just suspend use of VAR for pens? Changing the rule instead is ass backwards.

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/..._the_day&ns_linkname=sport&ns_source=facebook

adam said:

Why not just suspend use of VAR for pens? Changing the rule instead is ass backwards.

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/..._the_day&ns_linkname=sport&ns_source=facebook

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Correct. Looking at the goalkeeper during penalties is a brand new application of VAR, and it needs to go away. Solving a problem that was never there.

mgarbowski said:

To summarize my concerns more generally, I've seen two problems come up in every sport that adds video review.
1. One or more hard and fast rule(s) used to be applied loosely, if only because officials couldn't see tiny violations. Now they see them and are making calls accordingly.

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Your comments on this topic have been amazingly spot on and insightful I just wanted to mention one thing......

One key thing that Major League Baseball does to tidy up video review is:

Each team gets one video challenge. Now, if you get your first challenge right, you keep your challenge.

HOWEVER, if you challenge a call in the top of the 2nd inning at Dodger Stadium and the video review team (in NYC) says your challenge in invalid, you have zero challenges left for the remainder of the game.

Cameroon-England a textbook example that using VAR can actually reduce the faith that participants have in the integrity of the system, even though every call was at least arguably correct.

Really. Someone explain to me what it is that VAR accomplishes that outweighs all these negatives?

mgarbowski said:

Cameroon-England a textbook example that using VAR can actually reduce the faith that participants have in the integrity of the system, even though every call was at least arguably correct.

Really. Someone explain to me what it is that VAR accomplishes that outweighs all these negatives?

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When used well I think it can prevent these kinds of near-revolts.

I don't have to think back too far to memories of referees being chased by players, even fans.

These things happen without VAR too.

Christopher Jee said:

When used well I think it can prevent these kinds of near-revolts.

I don't have to think back too far to memories of referees being chased by players, even fans.

These things happen without VAR too.

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That's not a defense of something that wastes time. It needs to improve things to justify itself.

mgarbowski said:

That's not a defense of something that wastes time. It needs to improve things to justify itself.

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Is anybody keeping track of this somehow?

ETA:

Key Ifab findings:

• In the 804 matches there were 3,947 checks for possible reviewable incidents.
• 56.9% ofchecks were for penalty incidents and goals.
• There was an average of fewer than five checks per match.
• The median check time of the VAR is 20 seconds.
• The median duration of a review is 60 seconds.
• 68.8% ofmatcheshad no review.
• One decision in three matches is a "clear and obvious error".
• In 8% ofmatches the VAR had a decisive impact on the outcome of the game.
• 24% of all matches were positively affected by the involvement of VAR (changing an initial incorrect decision by the referee).
• The average time'lost' due to the VAR represents less than 1% of overall playing time.

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Now to filter that through the lens of fan enjoyment ...

mgarbowski said:

Cameroon-England a textbook example that using VAR can actually reduce the faith that participants have in the integrity of the system, even though every call was at least arguably correct.

Really. Someone explain to me what it is that VAR accomplishes that outweighs all these negatives?

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I didn't get to see Cameroon-England live, but I've gone back and seen the highlights and gotten the gist.

Not sure why this game out of all of them is an indictment of VAR. It overturned calls to get to the correct result. The source of Cameroon's complaints is unclear to me. Every call that went against them, including the ones not reviewed, was close, but ultimately correct.

I wouldn't want my team to lose (or even win) because of a wrong call that can easily be corrected with VAR - if that means a minor disruption of the game, then so be it - there are plenty of other time wasting tactics that teams use on field - hopefully the VAR process will get better with time

Using VAR on the goalie coming off the line during a penalty kick was wrong since it doesn't fall under one of the 4 reasons to check the video - the Cameroon game was a mess because they were whining about calls that were corrected with VAR

sad times for Fox Sports Go streaming to not be working... for anyone else having problems like me that needs a stream (its in spanish)

http://stream.telemundodeportes.com...final-copa-mundial-femenina-fifa-francia-2019

LionNYC said:

Fox Sport Go can't load anything live on my laptop or phone. This link worked.

https://www.foxsports.com/soccer/fi...-states-june-24-2019-matchcenter-stream-54509

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this link works for me, thank you. only thing is its about 30 seconds behind the spanish feed but well worth if to actually understand what the commentators are saying